Finding peace in incarnation

In today's reading from Richard Rohr's Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent , Rohr talks again about "fasting from the right things" -- because today's passage from Isaiah (Isaiah 58: 9b - 14) echoes yesterday's questions about what we need to be releasing in our lives.

After talking about fasting from unkindness and choosing justice, he moves to the Gospel passage (Luke 5:27 - 32) and explains that Jesus is reminding us that any "definition of 'holiness as separation from' is entirely wrong."  Jesus, says Rohr, "has come to transform people, not to exclude them.  He has come for the seeming losers, and not to create a country club for the supposed winners."

I like this: I hear echoes of the Ash Wednesday sermon; this important concept of oneness and connection.

But then our prayer prompt for today is this: "God, where am I trapped and unable to see it?"

For some reason I couldn't quite seem to make the transition from the readings to the prayer.  I sat with it for a few minutes, and then, because I still had half a cup of coffee left, I decided to pick up the book my church and our diocese are reading for Lent: Desmond and Mpho Tutu's Made for Goodness.

And there it was again, this issue of separation, in the preface: "In the past our survival depended on recognizing and being suspicious of difference.  If people were in and of our group, we could assume good intent.  If people were not in and of our group, we would be safest to assume evil intentions.  Vestiges of that belief are retained in our behavior... but the atomized homogeneous groups that existed in the past are no longer the truth of our world.  Our planet will not survive if we cling to the verities of the past.  We must recognize that we are part of one group, one family -- the human family.  Our survival as a planet depends upon it."

Somehow Tutu's words help me understand that we build our own traps; that we are trapped by our own sense of separation, of "other-ness," by all the ways we exclude or denigrate  or avoid those who are "not like us." Exploring this further in my meditation, I could see that I am trapped by my fears of "not-okay-ness," by my own shoulds and constraints, which keep me from understanding fully how deeply I am loved, and how much I, too, am a part of the universal oneness.

But some of that is also entangled with the fact that I struggle with a sense of otherness inside myself.  If I look at yesterday's post, I can clearly see that the parts of me that strive for calmness and oneness, the Buddha parts, are almost contemptuous of what I think of as the incarnate parts of me, the parts that are fully engaged in the world and therefore susceptible to fear and longing and snideness and all the other challenges of being human. 

And now I understand why I was so drawn to this little Buddha yesterday.  It's because I am so used to seeing buddhas -- and Buddhism -- as a way of finding peace through separating from the petty worldly concerns that make up such an important part of my life.  But it's not really (or doesn't have to be)  an either/or proposition.  The tenderness implicit in this image unites that Buddhist piece with the concept of incarnation.  Perhaps I need to be less ashamed of my humanness.  And perhaps the Holy Spirit -- "who broods over creation like a mother over her children" -- is every bit as present when I am exploring my Buddha nature as when I am pursuing the path of Christ.

Somehow I need to integrate these important facets of my faith life -- Christianity and Buddhism, "in the world and not of the world," incarnate and other-worldly.  I suspect that in working toward that integration I may finally come to realize at the very deepest heart of my being, as Joyce said in her wonderful comment yesterday, "If you knew Who walked beside you at all times, on this path that you have chosen, you could never experience fear or doubt again."